First in a new Pull Request series on the New American Right.
There's a vision of post-Trump conservatism being dreamed up by academics and writers, and it's fusing with workaday politics. I'm setting out to understand it.
This was partly spurred by a NYT piece that dropped on this burgeoning movement (which I've been following for a while and includes some people I know), which both thrust the scene into the mainstream light and also caused a bit of a ruckus within it.
'Post-liberal'....just think about that phrase for a second.
When's the last time a US political faction considered jettisoning what currently passes for liberalism?
Well, read on:
They also despise the market almost as much as the left. Bow-tie wearing Republican wonks discussing the benefits of a lower corporate tax rate...this is not.
The political horseshoe has become a pretzel, and this New Right's catchphrases rhyme with those of Warren or Bernie.
The above quotes are from @PatrickDeneen's brilliant 'Why Liberalism Failed', perhaps the intellectual guiding light of the movement.
@PatrickDeneen A major concept (and contradiction) of this New Right is that of the 'common good': the moral vision of society which the state should actively intervene to realize.
Rather than a conservatism of personal freedom, the New Right subordinates society to moral ends.
The contradiction here is, well, which common good?
This New Right is composed of an amalgam of Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Jews.
Whose notion of good are we going with?
The US isn't Hungary (or Spain). There is no default background religion that serves as the moral counterpoint to secular society. The only way to reconcile the various religious claims is via a substrate of mutual tolerance...which is the very liberalism that's being rejected.
I'll close with a favorite trad talking point: Chesterton's fence.
When coming upon a useless-seeming fence in a field, before tearing it down, consider that maybe our ancestors erected it for a good reason.
Real traditionalism would make us pause at its destruction.
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It's intriguing how journalists updating their mistaken notions of the world constitutes the very fact-finding process at the core of their profession.
Sure, progress. But it would also help if they didn't start from such a low base.
Take this thread.
We've finally ascertained that FB uses FB internally, so their internal convo is like online discourse: posts are informal discussions, notes are blogs, and documents are formal conclusions with management buy-in. There are no 'memos'.
For the millionth time, the media is fabricating a moral panic around their belated discovery that Facebook does what they do, but better, more scalably, and more profitably.
This is the 2016 Facebook panic all over again, but with fewer Russians. You’d think the storyline would get old, but no…
There's almost nothing novel in the leaked Facebook docs, other than confirmation of Facebook's slowing growth and aging userbase.
Everything being discussed now was being discussed years ago. There were whole chapters in Chaos Monkeys about it. Big whoop.
@realchrisrufo When I did my due diligence on someone that the entire NYT/WaPo/NYer media empyrean is lining up to trash, I was surprised to discover his background as a mainstream PBS/Netflix blue-state filmmaker.
But then something flipped....
@realchrisrufo The @realchrisrufo I spoke to no longer cares about the elite media sphere; he cares about winning anti-CRT measures across the United States, one school district at a time.
The reason why the Left loses its mind on the topic of genetics is twofold:
1. It undercuts blank-slatism, which presupposes humans are infinitely malleable (to not say perfectable) by society. This is one of the core beliefs of contemporary liberalism.
2. Among the horrifying implications of abandoning blank-slatism is that in our technological society which prizes mental agility beyond all other virtues, it may be the case that some, when measured against this very one-dimensional metric, may do less well than others...
...and since this liberal society (for all its appearances of cuddly progressivism) accepts status and power as the only sources of moral dignity (and rejects other virtues such as kindness, loyalty, humility, steadfastness, etc.), to even go here is unthinkable.
Like a good PMC worker bee, I bought a Tesla 3 for my (brief) Apple job, and it ended up changing everything about my life. Now I can't imagine living without it. Neither will you, after you've tried it. The world won't be the same after wide adoption.
Driving goes from a miserable task where your entire attention is squandered on a menial task, to a question of what to do sitting in a leather chair in an internet-connected lounge. It’s more like taking a business-class flight than anything else.